J&K police guns down 3 ultras as ISIS affiliated module is busted

Srinagar: Three militants including Eesa Fazli and Syed Owais, both of whom left their B.Tech third year course to join militancy, were killed in an encounter on Monday, a development being seen as a blow to the attempts by the notorious terror group ISIS to gain ground in the Kashmir Valley.

Three militants were spotted at a village in the Hakura area of Anantnag district in south Kashmir late last night and special teams were despatched after intelligence inputs confirmed the presence of Fazli and Owais, officials said.

The locality was cordoned at 1 am and in a brief encounter, the three cadres of Tehreek-ul-Mujahideen, a terror group which has announced its affiliation to the ISIS, were gunned down as they tried to escape under the cover of darkness, they said.

The operation was kept "top secret" till its execution as Fazli had managed to give the security forces a slip man a times before, an official said.

"In the process, arms and ammunition which include AK 47 rifles, pistols, hand-grenades, etc. were recovered from the encounter site. There was no collateral damage during the operation, " a police spokesman said.

One of the slain militants was involved in a recent attack on a police guard post at Soura in the city, in which a

police constable was killed, he added.

Fazli along with Owais left engineering studies in third year and joined militancy in 2017. It was initially believed that the two had joined Hizbul Mujahideen, but later it was found they were part of the Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind, a radical outfit which called for jihad to establish caliphate in Kashmir.